Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Disclaimer: Please note I am a member of Amazon Vine and received an Advance Reader Copy of this book. What this means: I am *required* to review it, and Amazon reviews *require* a star rating. I prefer not to give a star rating to a book I haven't finished since I might not be fair to the book as a whole; but I can't rate a book I'm not finishing with more than one star. You see the dilemma. So, here goes. This is the eleventh book I have read (well, almost read) by Adrian McKinty. I have loved the Michael Forsythe trilogy, the Sean Duffy series, and to a lesser but still definite degree Falling Glass. I grabbed the opportunity to read this for review although the premise sounded a bit far-fetched and I don't read thrillers as a rule. I had no doubt McKinty could make a thriller readable for me and infuse his signature character development that has always made me worry and root for his protagonists even when they're committing cold-blooded murder. Forty pages into The Chain, I felt as if there must be two Adrian McKintys writing fiction and this must be the other one. The dialogue was informational, voiceless, and passionless; the wit was missing altogether; the protagonist was entirely flat. I persevered because hey, McKinty wrote this. It's got to get better. It can't not get better. Well, at least by p. 151 (where I stopped), it doesn't. Pete is an ex-Marine because the plot needs him to know what he's doing. Rachel is a cancer survivor so we sympathize with her. On top of the lack of character depth is a lack of reality in a single thing going on so far. At the point I gave up, the author causes his supposedly competent hero to be stupid for the purpose of tension, and then escalates tension yet again only to de-escalate the new tension immediately because the only purpose for the second tension was, you guessed it, more tension. (I would be more specific but I don't want to give spoilers.) Maybe the thriller audience has no problem with writing driven entirely by plot twists; if you love thrillers, don't take my review too seriously. But if you love Sean Duffy and Michael Forsythe, don't expect to find characters of their caliber here. Anyway I'm done. I don't buy any of it and, worse, if I don't care about the characters as real people, the book can quite literally wipe them all out and I'm still not going to care. [Edit: I reconsidered the fairness of not finishing a book that I'm required to review, but finishing it did not improve my opinion of it, so my star rating stands.]